Our Bodies Our Selves

We, as a planet, are living the ancient Chinese curse regarding “interesting times.” People who were once relegated to the end of the bar where they could sport their tinfoil hats and demand that “someone do something about them things that done need stuff done to them” all while pouring salt in their beer are now being elected to office. Often while wearing their tinfoil hat and carrying their salted beer. We also live in a world where cultures, despite the kicking and screaming of the raging xenophobes, are blending. This is a mixed blessing. Our differences make us stronger but assimilation helps us understand our brethren better. Often times we find ourselves attempting to figure out which pieces of our culture to keep and which to discard. For example, just because it has been a tradition for all the white kids to wear black face at Christmas events, is this really how you want the world to perceive you from now on? And for those who answered yes, could you explain why without sounding really crazy? Thanks.

But all of the above is meant to frame what is about to come. Some people have just decided that the world needs one extra slot just for them. For example, Venus Angelic has taken cosplay to a whole new level.

A lot of girls enjoy dressing up their dolls, but a 15-year-old London teenager gets her kicks dressing up like her dolls.

She’s Venus Angelic and she is becoming the latest Internet cult figure thanks to her bizarre YouTube videos. Angelic teaches viewers how to make themselves look like a ball-jointed doll and offers other strange makeup tips.

“Some people were asking me, ‘how do you do your makeup?’ and I decided to put a tutorial on YouTube,” Angelic told the cast of RightThisMinute, a daily syndicated TV show that focuses on the strangest clips hitting the Internet.

Angelic has been dressing up like her doll for two years and was inspired by a love of Japanese anime culture that started when she lived in Japan for a couple of years, according to RightThisMinute producer Betsy Gessel.
“She’s not Japanese,” Gessell told HuffPost Weird News. “But she spent some time there and it influenced her.”

It not only influenced her look, but also her voice, which sounds like a babyish version of Yoko Ono. Angelic insists it’s real.

“She’s not Asian. She’s western,” Gessell said. “Her mom had an almost German accent. I also think she really is a teenager, but, in some ways, she does seem wise beyond her years.”

As far as Angelic’s mom is concerned, she does approve of her daughter’s dollish ways.

“She actually thinks it’s cute to wear cute and frilly clothes,” Angelic said. “I don’t think that I will ever stop. I think I will grow in my style and just keep doing what I love.”

As Angelic grows in her style, Gessell predicts so will her popularity.

“She has influenced a lot of people,” Gessell said. “[Dressing like a doll] is something a lot of people think about and she’s making it safe.”

I’m missing something somewhere. What difference does it make if she’s Japanese or not? I know they invented cosplay, they also invented sushi, that doesn’t mean that they alone can like it. Anyway, as she grows older she’ll realize that the only money she can make with that look is in porn. Then we’ll either be gifted with some very odd porn or she’ll get a new hobby.

One young lady who has been forced to pit reality against fantasy is 12 year old Natasha Mora whose nickname is Rapunzel.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel isn’t just letting down her hair — she’s chopping it off for the first time in her life.

Natasha Moraes de Andrade, 12, has the fairy-tale nickname because her hair is 5 feet, 2 inches long. That’s less than two inches shorter than her body, the Sun reports.

The Brazilian pre-teen has never had a haircut. But the arduous task of brushing for an hour and a half each day and a $600 yearly shampoo bill have led Moraes de Andrade to finally agree to trim her locks.
“I love my long hair and I’ll be sad when it’s gone,” she said, according to the Daily Mail. “But it’s a pain looking after it. I can’t do a lot of things, like P.E. lessons at school.”

Moraes de Andrade told the publication she hopes to sell her hair for around $5,000 and use the money to refurbish her bedroom.

Though her wavy locks are strikingly long, Moraes de Andrade is a far cry from earning the world record for longest hair. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, that title belongs to China’s Xie Qiuping, whose measures a solid 18 feet, 5.54 inches.

According to the book, Qiuping has been growing her hair since 1973, when she was 13-years-old.

At least she’s using her loss for her gain as well.

Speaking of personal gains, new studies report that women experience orgasms while exercising. But only during specific exercises, so pay attention.

Women may not need a guy, a vibrator, or any other direct sexual stimulation to have an orgasm, finds a new study on exercise-induced orgasms and sexual pleasure.

The findings add qualitative and quantitative data to a field that has been largely unstudied, according to researcher Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. For instance, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues first reported the phenomenon in 1953, saying that about 5 percent of women they had interviewed mentioned orgasm linked to physical exercise. However, they couldn’t know the actual prevalence because most of these women volunteered the information without being directly asked.

Since then, reports of so-called “coregasms,” named because of their seeming link to exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, according to the researchers.

“Despite attention in the popular media, little is known scientifically about exercise-induced orgasms,” the researchers write in a special issue of the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy released in print this month. [5 Myths About Women’s Bodies]

Herbenick and her colleagues used online surveys to gather their data, which included answers from 124 women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms and 246 women who reported exercise-induced sexual pleasure. Most of the women, ages 18 to 63 and an average age of 30, were in a relationship or married and 69 percent said they were heterosexual.

The researchers found that about 40 percent of both groups of women had experienced exercise-induced pleasure or orgasm on more than 11 occasions in their lives. Most of the women in the “orgasm” group said they felt some level of embarrassment when exercising in public places.

The “orgasm” group mostly said during the experiences they weren’t having a sexual fantasy or thinking about someone they were attracted to.

Of the women who had orgasms during exercise, about 45 percent said their first experience was linked to abdominal exercises; 19 percent linked to biking/spinning; 9.3 percent linked to climbing poles or ropes; 7 percent reported a connection with weight lifting; 7 percent running; the rest of the first-time experiences included various exercises, such as yoga, swimming, elliptical machines, aerobics and others. Exercise-induced sexual pleasure was linked with more types of exercises than the orgasm phenomenon.

Answers to open-ended questions in the survey revealed some interesting details, the researchers found. For instance, the abdominal exercises tied to orgasms seemed to be particularly associated with the exercise in which a person supports their weight on their forearms on a so-called captain’s chair with padded arm rests and then lifts their knees toward their chest.

The open-ended questions also revealed the orgasms tended to occur after multiple sets of crunches or some other abdominal exercise rather than after just a couple repetitions; they also seemed to happen after the woman had really exerted herself.

“Many of these women talked about it happening even as children,” Herbenick said during a telephone interview, adding that some indicated an experience at age 7 or 8.

“We had at least one woman in the study who was a virgin, and she really loved that she could have these experiences at the gym,” Herbenick said. [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]

The researchers aren’t sure why certain exercises lead to orgasm or sexual pleasure, though Herbenick hopes to tease out the trigger in ongoing research.

“It may be that exercise, which is already known to have significant benefits to health and well-being, has the potential to enhance women’s sexual lives as well,” Herbenick said, adding that it isn’t clear whether these exercises could actually enhance women’s sexual experiences.

The research has various implications regarding women’s sexuality. For one, orgasm and sexual desire have topped women’s list of sex concerns, with around one out of four women not reaching orgasm during sex. The researchers suggest “it may be that physical exercise has been overlooked in clinical approaches to women’s orgasm.”

Second, scientists have long debated the evolutionary context of the female orgasm and its link to sexuality and reproduction. However, if many women are experiencing orgasm during exercises not related to sex, then exercise-induced orgasm may reveal what orgasm does and does not have to do with sex or reproduction, the researchers note.

In addition, exercise-induced orgasms may be one way for scientists, and women themselves, to learn about the process of orgasm. “It may be one way for women to learn more about how their bodies work in that regard,” Herbenick said.

As for how other scientists may react to the finding: “I think from having talked with colleagues, while some people have heard of these [exercise-induced orgasms], many of our colleagues haven’t either,” Herbenick told LiveScience. “So I think that’s going to be interesting,” seeing the reaction. She added that some might question, “‘Is this a tooth fairy type of thing or does it really happen?’ I have no doubt that it happens.”

I could have saved them a ton of money. When my ex used to work out she’d come home with a glow like you wouldn’t believe. At first I thought she was cheating on me but, no, she was working on her “core.”

She had a wonderful core.

Of course there are other ways to self induce various feelings. Nokia is hoping that people are becoming so attached to their phones that they will tattoo the ringer into their flesh.

Today’s best smartphones still can’t alert human owners about an incoming call or text without either annoyingly loud rings or vibrations that can go unnoticed. That’s why Nokia would let smartphone owners feel the vibrations on their skin through a magnetic tattoo.

The touch-based twist on cellphone alerts surfaced in a Nokia patent filing reported by UnwiredView.com. If the tattoo idea ever became reality, it could mean an end to the days when a silenced cellphone means missing calls and text messages during a movie or music concert.

Smartphone owners could specify their mobile devices to send out patterns of magnetic pulses as shorthand Morse code for different phone alerts, according to the Nokia patent filing. A series of short, strong pulses might let the owner know about messages from a certain friends, while a weaker series of long pulses might signal that the phone’s battery is running low.

The skin tattoo’s ink could contain permanent magnets ranging from iron to magnetite. It could even use rare earth elements — such as neodymium — used as powerful magnets for hybrid car motors and computer hard drives.

If smartphone users don’t like the idea of a magnetic tattoo etched into their skin, Nokia’s patent allows for other choices such as a temporary magnetic spray, stamp, sticky decal or perhaps a wristband.

Nokia even envisions the possible use of paramagnetic materials that act as magnets only in the presence of an outside magnetic field. Such tattoos could prove a better choice for people with medical implants or others who have extra sensitivity to magnetic materials.

This latest example of haptic feedback technology — based on the sense of touch — also represents another way of connecting human bodies to everyday gadgets. Past ideas for merging humans and mobile devices have included turning human skin into multitouch controllers.

For those of you worried that the evil government was going to insert chips in us it must be a great relief to realize we’re going to do it to ourselves.

Maybe not.

Of course I can’t let you go through your day without introducing you to a moron, and today’s no exception. Homeland Security arrested a drug smuggler with the license plate SMUGLER at the Smuggler’s Inn and …. oh, just read it.

You would think a drug runner would know better than to get into a car with a personalized license plate with the letters S-M-U-G-L-E-R.

Or that she would think twice before booking a room at the Smuggler’s Inn, a mere sprint from the Canadian border.

Homeland Security agents received a tip in mid-December about a cocaine deal at a Pizza Hut in Bellingham, Wash., the SeattlePI.com reported, citing recently released court documents. They set up surveillance at the Pizza Hut and watched as a GMC Yukon with a driver and two passengers pulled in. The license plate read SMUGLER.

Agents followed the SUV to the Smuggler’s Inn, pulled it over and found, in a large, white box, nine bricks of cocaine weighing just under 24 pounds, the P-I reported.

One of the passengers, Jasmin Klair, 20, admitted that the illicit cargo was hers and agreed to cooperate with law enforcement officials, according to court documents. She explained to agents that she had been told to book at a bottom-floor room facing Canada at the Smuggler’s Inn, a bed and breakfast with rooms named “Al Capone” and “DB Cooper.” Klair wanted the “Captain’s Room,” about 150 feet from the border.

While agents interviewed her, she started receiving text messages from two men who had given her the job, the Vancouver Sun reported. Authorities prevailed on her to beckon the two men to the Smuggler’s Inn.

They arrived within minutes, the Sun reported, and made a run for it when police ordered them to stop.

One of the two men, Narminder Kaler, allegedly told agents that he would have received $2,000 for the deal, according to the Sun. He sorely needed it, he is alleged to have said, to pay off a $325,000 debt for losing 115 pounds of marijuana a year and a half ago.

Klair, 20, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to conspiring to distribute cocaine, the P-I reported. She will be sentenced on May 29. Kaler and Gurjit Sandhu are in jail and face similar charges, according to the P-I.

Boulé, the Smuggler’s Inn owner and driver of the SUV, took the recent events in stride. Last year, 57 people were arrested going through his property.

“It’s part of life on the border,” Boulé said. “The officers go through on the hour every hour. There are sensors in the yard. We’re on camera where we live.”